Individuals are often faced with the dilemma of what to eat or cook for a particular meal. In today's society where families consist of either two working spouses or a single working parent, such a decision may cause extra dilemma and stress on the parent who comes home from a long day at work and tackles the decision of what to make for dinner. Thus, if the parent gets home from work around dinner time, he or she may opt for something simple and quick—if all the ingredients needed to prepare the meal are available at the home. If all the ingredients needed to prepare the meal are not available, he or she must make a trip to the store or figure out what to make from the ingredients at home. As a consequence, the family's menu is unimaginative, and may typically end up eating the same food over and over again.
The expansion of personal computers into homes of average consumers provides some relief on the parent with the task of preparing the meals. If a particular ingredient is missing, the parent need not make a physical trip to the grocery store, but may be now purchase the ingredient over the Internet. Internet shopping, although capable of providing convenient purchasing capabilities from one's home, also supplies numerous downfalls. One of the main downfalls is that purchasing products over the Internet may be a time-consuming experience. A customer purchasing various products must generally first find and specifically select the products for inserting into an electronic shopping cart. When the products to be purchased are grocery items required for preparing a particular meal, the find and selection process may entail numerous clicks, making the shopping process more tedious and time-consuming.
Prior art exists for expediting the check-out process during Internet shopping so that an order may be placed via a single click. However the customer must still find and expressly select each product to be purchased before placing the order. The time and effort expended in finding and selecting the products, therefore, remain the same.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for expediting the meal selection process as well as the process for purchasing the ingredients for preparing the meals. Such as system should select and recommend certain meals to the user based on his or her food preferences. The system should further create an electronic shopping list based on the recommended meals.